Blog traffic lessons from celebrity blogger

Darren Rowse has a posted a case study providing tips for increasing your blog traffic. Comes from Derek Hail (I’ll confess I have no idea who she is) who has learned how to increase her unique visits from 50 to 1500 over the last 6 weeks.

She began by promoting her blog through friends, I expect through the net via email and particularly friends who published blogs. She asked friends for feedback on how she was doing. After two weeks she started aggressively promoting her blog.

Here’s the seven blog lessons she learned.

1. Blog traffic exchanges are worthless. Instead of wasting time surfing for credits on other blogs, write content. Most of these people surf these blogs for credits and do not read anything.
2. Collect a list of all the links possibly available in your niche. Go to those blogs and leave insightful and funny comments. Authors of less popular blogs would view her website and write about it. On more popular blogs with significant amount of traffic, some of the readers would visit her blog.
3. The reader of a related blog can be your reader as well. Most people who comment on blogs in a particular niche, usually have their own blog which is not necessarily related to the niche they are reading about. Leave insightful comments on their blogs as well. This attracts someone who was already interested in a particular niche to her blog because she was taking the time to comment on their blog.
4. Submit articles to popular web-sites in hopes of getting picked up.
5. Sell yourself and your blog. Make the blog worthwhile to read. She did so by entertaining her readers with humor.
6. Ask for link exchanges the right way. She collected a list of links of approximately two hundred blogs that were in the same niche as hers. She had mixed success by informally emailing these bloggers. She decided to create formal email messages that included proper greetings and format. Her success with professional emails went up drastically.
7. Create a community. It is not uncommon for other bloggers to plug each other when they find something they find interesting. Instead of relying on luck, she set up a community of a few bloggers who would exchange plugs with each other a few times a week.

Obviously a celebrity is going to generate more traffic to their blog, but there’s some lessons to be learned here.

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